Interactive democracy: The social roots of global justice (original) (raw)

2015, Contemporary Political Theory

Interactive Democracy's central vision is for maximally local, democratic communities, which are linked by transnational institutions, to build up interactive democratic representation and participation in decisions that affect them. To realize this vision, Gould engages with a broad sweep of topics and approaches, including social ontology of human rights and democracy, Habermasian discourse ethics, care ethics, the importance of gender equality, recognition justice, cosmopolitanism, solidarity, emergent technology, humor as cross-cultural understanding and more. Gould reviews and expands many ideas from other books and articles for the purpose, making the text useful both for newcomers and those familiar with her earlier work. A theme running through these diverse topics is the idea of communitieswhat they are, and what ethical relations between and within them look like. This aspect of the book is not as highlighted as some others, but it is necessary for all stages of Gould's argument, and her work on it is a valuable contribution to social and political philosophy. Therefore, it is worth focusing on for this review. The book argues that communities are necessary for human agency. Full agency involves 'not only the capacity for choice, but also a process of the development of capacities and the realization of long-term projects over time, as well as the cultivation of relationships' (p. 16). Developing capacities and realizing complex, temporally distant projects (and of course developing relationships) make this version of agency presuppose interdependency among individuals. These relations form a community character for those agential projects the book describes as 'common activities' or 'joint activities' (p. 16). As Gould says, 'In these cases, the activity is oriented to shared ends or goals, and the social group is understood as constituted by individuals in the relations rather than as existing holistically above or beyond them' (p. 16). These communities of shared projects and goals develop 'power-with,' which Gould quotes Amy Allen to define as a capacity of a group 'to act together for the attainment of a common or shared end or series of ends' (cited on p. 185). Voluntary formation of these communities is 'probably a normative desideratum' (p. 233), but not necessary.